Okay, a couple of interesting things that caught my eye today. First, software that claims to “help you save time waiting in line at Walt Disney World and Disneyland” and, guess what, it actually seems to work. This is what Patrick Crispen writes in the latest issue of Tourbus (which, btw, is an excellent newsletter for anyone looking to make heads and tails of the Internet):
We rode 13 rides before lunch! On a Sunday! In May! In a Disney theme park! How did we do it? Well, before we left the house, we used a commercial Windows program called “RideMax.” RideMax computed the historical wait times for each of the rides we selected and then created a printable, minute-by-minute, ride-by-ride itinerary that routed us around the longest lines. We printed our personalized RideMax itinerary, took it with us to the park, and then proceeded to completely wear out my girlfriend’s two nieces [who actually fell asleep at lunch.] Our longest wait time was approximately 10 minutes [Autopia], and on most of the rides we simply walked on without any wait time at all.
Don’t care much about theme parks myself, but it’s an interesting use of technology to say the least. How does it work? Like Patrick briefly mentioned, by analyzing the patterns on all of the rides, each day, over the years and using algorithms to predict the wait time for each ride on the day you plan to visit the theme park. It gives you the order in which to visit the slides and the expected wait time etc. You can catch all the details on how it works here. It’s not free and is Windows-only, which makes it one of the few software of it’s kind to be featured here 😉
The second thing is Pakistan’s plan to launch the world’s largest WiMax network. Why is that interesting? Well I am hoping this hurts the pride of some minister in New Delhi and the whatever-you-can-do-we-can-do-better bug that seems to infect the politicians on both sides of the border can do some good for once and spark some momentum into our sporadic WiMax efforts.